1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to electronic devices and, more specifically, in certain embodiments, to parallel finite state machines for pattern-recognition.
2. Description of Related Art
In the field of computing, pattern recognition tasks are increasingly challenging. Ever larger volumes of data are transmitted between computers, and the number of patterns that users wish to detect is increasing. For example, spam and malware are often detected by searching for patterns in a data stream, e.g., particular phrases or pieces of code. The number of patterns increases with the variety of spam and malware, as new patterns may be implemented to search for new variants.
Recognizing a pattern may often involve detecting various conditions indicative of the pattern. It may also be useful to count the number of times a condition(s) is(are) detected. Counters may be implemented to count a number of times a condition is detected. However, recognizing a pattern may sometimes involve certain quantifiers of detected conditions that may not be easily counted by a basic counter.